The Seoul Museum of Art has unveiled a spectacular new site-specific installation by renowned Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto, titled "Ba Ka Ba, a Dance of the Eternal Polarities." The ambitious work transforms the museum's Seosomun Main Branch lobby into an immersive sensory environment, marking a significant addition to the contemporary art scene in Seoul. Commissioned as part of the 2025 SeMA Public Space Project, this installation represents Neto's continued exploration of the complex relationships between the human body, architectural space, and collective human experience.
The centerpiece of Neto's installation consists of enormous crocheted structures crafted from industrial cotton fabrics in carefully chosen shades of brown and pink. These colors were deliberately selected to create symbolic connections with natural elements - the brown tones evoke tree trunks and the mystery of night, while the pink hues represent flowers and the brightness of day. This color palette establishes a meaningful dialogue between natural rhythms and the museum's modern architectural structure, creating a bridge between the organic and the built environment.
What makes this installation particularly unique is its multi-sensory approach to art engagement. The suspended crocheted forms are filled with dried guava leaves and locally sourced tea leaves, introducing aromatic elements that invite visitors to experience the work through smell and texture, not just sight. This sensory complexity reflects Neto's belief that art should engage the whole person, creating connections that go beyond traditional visual appreciation.
By occupying the museum's lobby and adjacent open spaces, the installation introduces a distinctly organic intervention into the building's otherwise linear and geometric architecture. The flowing, soft forms of the crocheted structures generate a cyclical sense of space that suggests continuity and transformation rather than fixed boundaries or rigid divisions. As visitors move through and around the installation, they encounter constantly shifting relationships between center and periphery, interior and exterior spaces.
The installation's intriguing title, "Ba Ka Ba," functions as an onomatopoeic expression, with its mirrored syllables referencing natural cycles and flows. This rhythmic quality extends into the work's broader conceptual framework, where traditional polarities such as body and space, sensation and thought, or self and other are not held apart but brought into active dialogue. For Neto, these intersections remain central to his artistic practice and reflect his deep connections to the Brazilian Neo-Concrete movement of the late 1950s and 1960s.
The Neo-Concrete movement, which significantly influenced Neto's artistic development, emphasized participation, direct sensation, and subjective experience as fundamental elements of art. In "Ba Ka Ba," these historical ideas are reimagined and given new life within Seoul's contemporary urban context. The installation creates an open environment where visitors don't just observe art but become active participants in the work itself, embodying a condition of exchange and interrelation that breaks down traditional barriers between artwork and audience.
The sensory components of the installation extend far beyond the purely visual, affirming art's vital role in daily life and human experience. Through this immersive work, Neto challenges conventional museum experiences and invites Seoul's residents and international visitors to engage with art in a more holistic, embodied way that celebrates both cultural dialogue and the universal human experience of sensory discovery.
